General · EdgepediaOctober 3, 20267 min read

African Queens

African Queens is a 2023 Netflix docudrama series that explores the lives of prominent African female rulers, blending scripted dramatic reenactments with expert interviews. It was ordered by Netflix as two seasons of four 45-minute episodes each, one queen per season, and was executive produced and narrated by Jada Pinkett Smith through Westbrook Studios with the British production company Nutopia¹. The first season, African Queens: Njinga, covers the 17th-century warrior queen of Ndongo and Matamba in present-day Angola; the second, Queen Cleopatra, covers the last pharaoh of Ptolemaic Egypt¹. The two seasons met sharply different receptions: critics rated the Njinga season favorably while audiences rated it poorly, and the Cleopatra season drew both poor audience scores and a public controversy over its casting²^•³.

Key fact	Detail
Format	Two seasons, 4 episodes of about 45 minutes each; hybrid of dramatized scenes and talking-head expert interviews¹
Season 1	African Queens: Njinga, premiered on Netflix February 15, 2023, timed to US Black History Month⁴
Season 2	Queen Cleopatra, premiered May 10, 2023, with Adele James in the title role⁵
Production	Westbrook Studios and Nutopia; executive producers include Jada Pinkett Smith, Miguel Melendez, Terence Carter, Sahara Bushue, Jane Root, Maxine Watson, and Ben Goold¹
Writers	Peres Owino and NneNne Iwuji wrote the Njinga season; directors were Ethosheia Hylton (Njinga) and Tina Gharavi (Cleopatra)⁶
Critical scores	Njinga: 88% on Rotten Tomatoes (8 reviews) and a Metascore of 69; Queen Cleopatra: a Metascore of 45 and a 1% audience score on Rotten Tomatoes²^•⁷^•³
Awards	12 Daytime Emmy nominations in 2024, winning Outstanding Casting; NAACP Image Award nomination for Outstanding Documentary (Television)⁶

Spoilers

Season 1: Njinga

The first season dramatizes the life of Njinga (also spelled Nzinga; her Christian name was Ana de Sousa), who became queen of Ndongo in 1624 as the region's first female ruler and reigned for some 37 years over Ndongo and later the neighboring kingdom of Matamba¹¹^•¹². Adesuwa Oni, a British-Nigerian actor, plays the title role, with Thabo Rametsi as Kasa, a leader of the Imbangala mercenaries⁹.

The season's first half covers the transfer of power from Njinga's father to her brother Mbande and then to Njinga; the second half covers her rule and her fight against Portuguese colonization and the transatlantic slave trade¹¹. The dramatization includes the decisions the sources record: her brother murdered her son to remove threats, and she later had her late brother's son killed to establish her legitimacy; she was baptized to be taken seriously by the Portuguese and requested that the Pope recognize her as a sovereign ruler¹¹. The series also addresses slavery directly, contrasting European chattel slavery with slavery in Ndongo, where enslaved people were often treated as part of the family, while acknowledging that Ndongo itself enslaved people it conquered¹¹.

Historical grounding. The season is based on the historian Linda Heywood's book Njinga of Angola: Africa's Warrior Queen (Harvard University Press, 2017), and John Thornton worked with a fact-checking group inside Nutopia called "the factuals"; Heywood and Thornton supplied them with hundreds of translated pages of original documents and illustrations¹³. On-screen experts include Queen Diambi Kabatusuila, the current woman king of the Bakwa Luntu people in the Democratic Republic of the Congo; Rosa Cruz e Silva, former director of the National Archives of Angola; the Yale art historian Cécile Fromont, who also served as a behind-the-scenes consultant; Olivette Otele; Luke Pepera; and Kellie Carter Jackson of Wellesley College¹¹^•¹⁴^•⁶. Fromont noted that the production had to negotiate between historical accuracy and modern sensibilities, giving as an example the social politics of modesty in dress, and described the finished product as partly right and partly wrong in historical terms¹⁴.

Season 2: Queen Cleopatra

The second season, released May 10, 2023, covers Cleopatra, emphasizing her intellect and rule rather than her romances, and is played by the British actor Adele James⁵. The producers said they intentionally depicted Cleopatra of mixed ethnicity to reflect theories about her possible Egyptian ancestry and the multicultural nature of ancient Egypt, noting that her race was unlikely to have been documented and that the identities of her mother and paternal grandparents are unknown⁵.

The casting choice reactivated a long-running debate over Cleopatra's identity. The Egyptologist Zahi Hawass reiterated that Cleopatra, born in Alexandria in 69 BC into the Ptolemaic dynasty, was of Macedonian Greek ancestry, and an Egyptian lawyer, Mahmoud al-Semary, pursued legal action over the portrayal¹⁵. The season was widely mocked; the Television Heaven review called it "very bad history" and "very bad drama," while noting that most of its dates were correct¹⁶.

Origin and purpose

Pinkett Smith has said the idea grew out of conversations with her daughter, Willow Smith, about what qualities actually make a queen, and out of her view that stories of Black queens were missing from popular history. "We have so much historical literature around the queens of England, but that's not the case with Black African queens," she told OkayAfrica⁸. Netflix ordered two seasons in January 2023, with the first premiering on February 15 to coincide with US Black History Month¹^•⁹.

The stated aim of the series is to reclaim the narratives of Africa's most iconic female rulers, whose legacies the producers say have been obscured or distorted by Western perspectives⁶. The executive producer Maxine Watson, a British factual-television veteran, told Deadline that the success of Black Panther and The Woman King had created a landscape in which shows like African Queens could flourish¹⁰.

Reception

The two seasons drew opposite audience and critic patterns. Njinga earned an 88% Tomatometer from eight critics on Rotten Tomatoes but only a 15% audience score, and a Metacritic Metascore of 69 (generally favorable, from five critics) against a user score of 1.0²^•⁷. Richard Roeper of the Chicago Sun-Times gave it four stars, calling it an "enlightening and captivating and invaluable deep dive" and noting that roughly 80% of the series is historical drama with the remaining 20% expert interviews¹⁷. Ellen E. Jones of The Guardian gave it two stars, judging the dramatized sections workaday and the series short on context and analysis beyond a straight recounting of the biography⁹. The All About History review criticized the season for superficial treatment and for glossing over Njinga's own involvement in the slave trade¹⁸.

Queen Cleopatra received a Metascore of 45 and, five days after release, a 1% audience score on Rotten Tomatoes, with viewers objecting to the casting and performances³. Retrospective commentary has argued that the opprobrium aimed at the Cleopatra season unfairly spilled over onto the Njinga season, which the same reviewer called "actually rather good"¹⁶.

Despite the divided reception, the franchise earned 12 Daytime Emmy nominations in 2024, winning Outstanding Casting, and an NAACP Image Award nomination for Outstanding Documentary (Television)⁶.

References

Topic: Encyclopedia › Arts and culture › Screen and stage › Film and television › Series and fictional screen worlds › Unscripted, reality, and web-native series › Documentary, docudrama, and lifestyle series › Music, arts, and biographical docuseries

Initially written Oct 3, 2026 · Reviewed: Oct 3, 2026; Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Oct 3, 2026; Oct 25, 2026; Nov 1, 2026 · Last review: Oct 25, 2026

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